Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Tech of SpaceX's Homegrown Rocket Engine
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a look at the engine behind SpaceX's Falcon rocket, the Merlin: "The rockstar of SpaceX may be Elon Musk, but the lead man behind the fire power is Tom Mueller. He is the Vice President of Propulsion Development and founding employee at SpaceX. Musk sought Mueller out in 2001 when Musk decided to build his own rockets instead of buying some from the Russians. Musk caught wind of a rocket engine Mueller built in his garage and 'apparently had a religious experience' once he saw it. If you didn't know, Elon Musk used $100 million of his Paypal money to start SpaceX. That money was used to build the Merlin engine Mueller had designed. The Merlin engine is the first new American booster engine in ten years and only the second in the last 25 years."
What a con man Robert Bussard was! He only spent most of his life working for NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission. Clearly he didn't know what he was doing, and only tried to make huge amounts of money from the government. Which is why he died broke and still looking for funding for his project. Weird how even after he died, the US navy picked the project up and is still working on it - with regular reviews by independent physicists.
The Polywell has taken something like 20M USD in its entire history, where ITER is supposed to cost about 20 billion. Funny how no Tokamak has managed to sustain ignition, or survive it's own radiation flux.
Polywell might not work, but Tokamaks don't, either.